This is one of my favorite internet quotes. It’s whimsical, but manages to capture the slippery slope many (me) find themselves falling into when it comes to building or learning things. I try to keep this quote in mind every time I notice myself creating too much of a given project from scratch. It works, sometimes.

Some examples of goat farming:

• Assuming you have to write all the HTML and such for a blog from scratch when it makes more sense just to use something like WordPress
• Writing linear algebra functions from scratch, when it’s more intelligent just to use a tried and true, tested library
• Writing a ray tracer from scratch when you already have Blender
• Modeling everything for rendered images when you can buy something much better for $2 just to say you did it all yourself (looking at you, 3D model of Spider-Man)
• Living without a coffee table because you insist on building one
• Living without kitchen knives because you insist on making them
• Living without shelves because you insist on. . .(you get the point)

Sometimes goat farming can be good, though, because it helps you learn a lot. Here are some times when I’m glad I did a little too much goat farming:

• Writing a ray tracer really helps teach what’s going on under the hood and can help get better results with proper tools
• Building a forge from scratch really helped understand what to look for in commercial forges
• Stumbling through creating websites from scratch really teaches how the internet works
• Building a desk for college ended up being one of the most fun projects I’ve done

I’m not really sure what the moral of the story is here, but I really like the goat farming analogy. I guess it’s to help you think carefully about what you’re doing — goat farming can be good, as long as you know when you should just buy some goats.